


Croatia Between

by pennypaperbrain



Series: Four Corners of the Western World [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, Bipolar Sherlock, Dom/sub, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-13
Updated: 2014-08-21
Packaged: 2018-02-13 01:11:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2131446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pennypaperbrain/pseuds/pennypaperbrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a side story to the <i>Four Corners of the Western World</i> series, written for professorfangirl after the main series was complete. It covers a period of hours during the time John and Sherlock spent in Croatia regrouping between the events of  ‘Malta Bright’ and ‘Piter Raw’. In Malta, Sherlock is suffering from a bipolar mixed episode. By their arrival in St Petersburg, he’s depressed. Here’s an interlude from Croatia, between.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [professorfangirl (lizeckhart)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart/gifts).



**Sherlock**

A Croatian resort at the tail end of November. Cool but not frigid. Quiet but not deserted. A short drive from Dubrovnik where Sherlock’s contacts are arranging fake identities so he and John can take on Kolyvanov. Visas are being forged - and tests done on the blood drawn yesterday to determine whether Sherlock can take lithium.

The reasons for doing the latter are both evident and, on a tree-lined coastal road at daybreak, (Sherlock barefoot, suffused with corruptive melancholic joy that blurs thought as it burrows ever inwards), unpersuasive. An outlier mood, plotted above the now unmistakable trend line, seized him on waking, and drove him out into a world which is curling in on itself in preparation for the mild Adriatic winter, while Sherlock burns with a fierce and dirty flame that permeates flesh and road and sky. Malta’s euphoria has decayed into a darker high, rich as shit and stained with God as every breath confirms the heat and oneness of being. 

This mushrooming of vapid mysticism is the latest denigration of himself by himself. Sherlock, fastidious, is sane enough to ration the licence he allows to insanity, but not to stem it. His intellect picks at details, imposing just far enough that he drops his trainers to the road and steps back into them, impeding his communion with creation but also preserving his damn feet. 

John has told him he’s broken. It appears this is true, because in Croatia he should be regrouping, analysing, learning Russian, but his discipline has stalled. Objectless nostalgia clogs his veins, and he could crack from the sweetness of it, the accretion of significance that twists to an exquisite peak inside him as seagulls cry and wheel and he observes his hand open and close on the ripeness of empty air. His behaviour is mad. His observation is undimmed.

A presence has coalesced beside him, and will not leave. Since he woke from uneven dreams this morning, he has been helplessly high, and his mother has been beside him. They walk the road to the sea.

 

**John**

John buys rolls from the little shop by the door of the hotel and takes them back to their room to wait for Sherlock. He isn’t going to worry; yes, waking to an empty bed and ‘Back soon’ scribbled on the flyleaf of a tourist guidebook, and knowing Sherlock has surely gone off somewhere to be bonkers, is less than ideal. But Sherlock bothered to leave a note at all, and who else would he do that for? They’ve agreed that Sherlock won’t lie about what’s happening to him. 

The blood test results will be coming this morning, couriered to the hotel to avoid further parading in areas foreigners would not normally frequent. All being well, John can start Sherlock on the lithium he has waiting in his bag. Then Kolyvanov...

No. One thing at a time. John sits on Sherlock’s side of the bed and eats a roll, thinking of how far they’ve come already. Standing at a graveside, wishing Sherlock back to life, he never imagined this turmoil. Is he handling it right? In a corner of Malta airport he’d tried to ask, but Sherlock scorned the topic, as if there were nothing to talk about.

John would like to be that sure. He isn’t _un_ sure. It’s just that the assumption that John will do no harm is not one everybody would make. 

Yesterday in Dubrovnik, between shuttling from office to clinic to bar on necessary errands, they found themselves sitting on a bench in a paved square, waiting for an appointment. Sherlock was irritable, but it was almost mild enough to be mistaken for a ‘normal’ state. He bitched about their tardy contact, and John risked a joke: ‘You just need a good hiding to calm you down.’

‘A proposition worth testing,’ agreed Sherlock. ‘At the hotel, I mean, of course.’ 

Explaining himself like that was a new development, as if he was assuring John that he understood about being marginally appropriate.

A light rainstorm was just easing, and John lowered his brolly so that the tips rested on the pavement, concealing from public view the hand that reached for Sherlock’s, and squeezed.

‘Think I can’t improvise?’ John said. ‘OK. Sit very still, or people will think I’m giving you a handjob.’

With unhurried medical precision, keeping his gaze on the cream walls and red roofs across the square, John bent each of Sherlock’s fingers back in turn. When he finally glanced sideways, John saw Sherlock’s eyes swimming with tears and his lips moving as if he was fighting to shape words. John eased back the pain. Sherlock closed his eyes as if savouring. John felt his own mind slow a little, his alertness deepening towards the wordless point where they meet in their unusual desires.

‘Weightless feeling,’ Sherlock said.

John comes back from the memory to find he’s scattered crumbly liberally on Sherlock’s side of the bed. Over on the desk, the ‘Back soon’ guidebook flyleaf flaps lazily at him in a slight breeze. Always, John has tried for balance that Sherlock then shreds.

‘Just fucking... _be_ with me,’ John says to the empty bed that is, at least, no longer a grave.

 

**Sherlock**

Sherlock passes a tourist cove overlooked by buildings. It isn’t what he needs, but then he is past need, exposed in the light of revelation. What tortured his mother is what compels him now, nothing less or more. He won’t follow her today, but nor can he shut out a past that hums so thickly in his ears it could break through to the present.

She was impatient and worn. He was a gawky, whining child. Yet he never doubted she loved him. Her hand lingers in his hair. They shared something beyond Father and Mycroft’s lumpen dourness... and it was this. What voices did it wear for her? Did she see the world shimmering in exaltation? Or was there only the darkness? Was she driven like this?

But this impossible meeting is not about old pain. Sherlock asks her: _Do you see John? Am I with him?_ Because she knew how to love. Sherlock is learning, now.

Her _yes_ enfolds him.

That is insane, a mirage. He is lit with it, alive with forgiveness, his mind stripped to bone and drenched in sunlight. Nothing is necessary, all is conceivable. He cannot contain this burgeoning. Possibility is molten in his veins. He must rest. Methods of suicide occur to him, as abstract as menu items when John demands he eat. Not yet. Not yet.

He’s come some way along the shore. Separated from the cove by an outcrop, visible only from this point on the road, there’s a patch of weathered whiteness, accessed down a flight of battered concrete steps. At the stones’ chaotic edge, an ancient, rusting ladder lists to one side as it sinks into the sea. It’s a former bathing spot, now half-consumed by the water. Ancient patterns of foot traffic can be deduced, but there’s nothing worth his attention. People came here previously, and now they don’t. 

Sherlock walks down the steps to the cracked white expanse, and lets himself flood. Sea, sky, stone and the tang of corroding metal merge with his flesh. Consciousness is a blur of pleasure and he has difficulty keeping his hand from his cock as the last insect of summer skims his vision, iridescent with equations of updraught and wingbeat that he could easily follow, easily... just not at present... He sheds his outer clothes (logical actions demonstrate his functionality) before diving into the sea.

The freezing jolt, for a moment, realigns him with himself. He’s Sherlock, in his body, fighting for his mind, and he’s here, in Croatia, with John. 

 

**John**

John has collected two envelopes that were delivered to hotel reception. He rips one open and reads that he himself is free of blood-borne disease, as he expected. Vistas of sexual exploration distract him for a short, pleasant while. But there are other matters at hand.

He places the other envelope on the desk, regards it for a moment, then sends Sherlock a carefully neutral text: ‘How long will you be?’

And then John’s just waiting, something he has a talent for. At home he smiled and did his homework while rows stormed over his head. On the Afghan steppe, he was the most vigilant medic and diligent watch officer. Good boy John, always anticipating other people, whether they’re going to flounce off, bleed to death or fire rockets at him. He waits and waits, and then he kills. 

Except those parallels are ridiculous. Ridiculous, to confuse the process of obtaining necessary medication for his lover with his own demons. 

‘Get back here, nutcase, you’re doing my head in :)’ he texts. ‘Got your results, and I’m opening them myself if you aren’t here by 11.30.’

 

**Sherlock**

When he opens his eyes and the bubbles drift away, there are fish. A shoal of them, shining silver-yellow.

They move in unison, as if shepherded. Sherlock sinks a little way back into the strangeness of himself, but the strangeness of his surroundings is balance. He rolls in the water and kicks himself off a stone towards the fish, but they shift effortlessly and dart deeper than he can go, shimmering across the weed-strewn seabed that stretches out from the shore, then flash and vanish. The distance is blue shading to darkness.

Sherlock exhales more bubbles. The cold is vicious but starting to blur, as if his body and overheated senses were neutralising its edge. The feeling of extending beyond himself, of the interlinkedness of all things, returns intensified, and he senses depths of ocean where eyeless, centreless creatures drift in gestalt with the surrounding pressure. He permeates their world and yet remains himself, a fixed point, as his body surfaces, breathes, and dives again. Awareness is pure miscarried intensity and takes again his mother’s form as he remembers – no, not remembers, imagines, except it is _real_ – the loosing of her mind as she sank beyond the light that still pins him. With her suffering he tastes her relief, and is glad for her that she was able to go, to release things she could no longer hold. 

She releases him. A corrosive wave of bliss crashes through his head.

The sun has brightened in the sky, shimmering above the green land as Sherlock surfaces fully and bobs, unmoving and observant. The scrubby vegetation surrounding the ancient bathing platform is rustling and burgeoning as if sentient, rich and lush as it was on Malta but with a still more threatening edge. 

His highs are shortening and darkening. From their unprecedented drugless intensity it’s logical for Sherlock to extrapolate, even if he cannot actually care, that he will soon experience a debilitating level of suffering. The brittle shell of the world conceals fomenting panic. Discerning this jars the harmony of self and other, and sends anger rippling through the rarefied air. What will happen when the eye of the mood passes over him? In London he jumped, and hit the ground, but still he’s falling. Love and fucking and touch were for so long irrelevant to him; why did it all burst in at once? Sweet air, sweet death, _what is happening?_

Sherlock sculls to the shore and drags himself out of the sea. He sits by the water, shaking with fullness and the mingled presences of his mother and John until he huddles into himself and begins to weep. His serenity is like gold stirred into sunset pools, and it’s too much, like sensitivity beyond orgasm, and he screams against it, a shocking sound. Gulls reply. Encroaching exhaustion and dread are a theory that presents itself, but he is secure in immutability. It will dissolve in a moment, leaving him terrified, only not yet, not yet.

On the rocks by his clothes is a mobile phone. 

Sherlock stares at it, for a moment thinking only of the sheer effrontery of its presence, because he has no memory of bringing the bloody thing. He has two messages. ‘Get back here, nutcase,’ he reads in John’s voice in his head. And soon they will know if he can take lithium. Lithium, which John says will stop all this. Save him. Change him. 

Sherlock puts his clothes back on and sets off towards John without telling himself it’s logical. He just inhabits, for a peaceful minute, the ordinary actions.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mania and depression blur, but Sherlock returns to John.

**John**

John is on the verge of opening the results himself when Sherlock marches in, heads straight for the desk below the still-drawn curtains as if he’s deduced the envelope will be there (he probably has), and rips it open. He reads, then thrusts the letter at John, who’s sitting on the bed.

John sucks in the data. There’s a suggestion of reduced kidney function, but it’s not sufficient to prohibit the use of lithium in case of medical necessity. _Relief._ In fact the figures suggest that it’s John’s second and third choice medications that would be risky. So lithium it is.

Sherlock is pacing the little room, down one side of the bed, around the end, up the other side and back.

‘I am high,’ he announces rapidly. ‘I am very high. It’s – turning.’

John grabs the lithium from his bag, pushes the starter dose out of its plastic bubbles onto his palm, sticks out his hand and stares up at Sherlock. He’s haggard, trembling, and, John realises with a pang, wearing his t-shirt back to front. There’s no figleaf of boredom or nicotine craving now. Just illness.

John stamps down his reactions and tries to keep a neutral look on his face. This is important.

Sherlock doesn’t baulk at the pills. The opposite: he grabs them out of John’s hand and gulps them dry. _Relief._ But now the practicalities are secured, a further detail of what John’s seeing hits home as Sherlock balls his fists and continues to pace. Damp hair.

‘Sherlock, have you been for a _swim_?’ 

Shit. John should have woken up and gone with Sherlock wherever it was, or simply kept them both here.

‘If I wanted to be dead I – I would be dead, you know that.’ Sherlock’s voice is shaking. ‘I need to calm down, and sadomasochistic sex is surely contrain..contraindicated when I am in this condition, so I employed solitude and discipline. The results were ul-ultimately unsatisfact...tfact... factory.’ He pauses as if to get control of himself and swallows. ‘I am insane. The sensation of black fire in my limbs is increasing. My mother released me.’ 

‘Your mother? You mean you’re hallucinating?’ Still, Sherlock’s honesty feels like blood flowing into the connection between them. 

‘No!’ Pace, pace, _crash_ as the desk chair is knocked aside. ‘Just imbecilic _feelings_. Cognitive distortion… I felt her. She forgave me. Something unknotted. I can’t hold it in, or I won’t. I am tired, John.’

All right. Fine. Sherlock’s not psychotic. Good, because John has to give himself some room.

‘So am I,’ he says. Though he doesn’t cry over killing, still he’s killed two men, and… partial flashback. His mouth seems to fill with it: the spray of Zagami’s brains, the stench of his mangled flesh. He pushes on through. ‘I kill for you, I hurt you because you want it, then you go for a swim to commune with your mother who drowned herself. What am I supposed to think?’ 

Sherlock paces and paces. ‘I’m not asking you to magically fix things,’ he says in a voice now rigid with effort.

‘Then what are you asking?’ 

Sherlock cocks his head in passing. His brief control dissolves. He looks terrified. Again. ‘Just be here, John. Please.’

 

**Sherlock**

Transcendence has warped into frenzy, to burning distortion through which the bland walls mock him as he wheels and paces, hand striking the wardrobe, the desk, the bedhead. The excuses of Vegas and distractions of Malta leeched out through the hole in the world that is John’s word _bipolar_ , and Sherlock is not intense/driven/a genius… he’s mad. All his glories and dirt led to this.

He paces for an hour while black energy gouts out of him, replenished with each breath. Cause and effect are remade; what goes down is up and must come up further. Realities blur and drip like a child’s painting, and he is scattered in the solar wind where he fused with the sky and liquesced into the sea and his mother forgave and released him... He exists in the rage and the violence and the intimately paradoxical suspension of will, the renouncement that allows this state, that countenances withdrawal of willpower, discipline, chemical aids and accepts that this is him. After all, his mother forgave him.

Sherlock is ill, and it would be futile to pretend otherwise. Therefore he will not pretend.

He observes John observing him. John is the beacon between the world of sanity and the place Sherlock is. John stares straight into him, through the translucent heat, and Sherlock, mad, is an abject curiosity and a loved thing. His mother left him; John will not. Sherlock has come to believe in that. John gave him lithium, the simplest possible drug, a salt combined with glycerol and stearates. It has no known effect on healthy brains. To accept it is to accept disease. Sherlock took it from John’s hand and John does not turn away from him, though Sherlock paces for an hour. Once John tries to talk, but Sherlock gestures silence and John does not try again. Speech would crack him, would contract the gathering fist of obligations (Kolyvanov, the threat to Lestrade and Martha Hudson, contacts, disguises...) and smash into him, his failures in rhythm with his pacing, with the pulse and surge of violence in his blood. So John is the pivot on which Sherlock or perhaps the world turns as he paces and paces for a second hour, his hard irreducible self cataloguing, the scuffed white walls unending... until Sherlock finally realises he is slowing down.

The sun has moved overhead. The afternoon light in this curtained room is dimmer. And Sherlock is not falling; he’s just not compelled to pace his next round, though his muscles still clench and his ears ring. His stride is easing as his energy drains. He instructs his legs to stop moving – and it happens, as he hears John speak his name. 

Sherlock’s will was suspended, and returns intact.

 

**John**

Sherlock is mad, and John is realigning. 

His practical concern is that Sherlock may try to leave the room. John would have to stop him then. But that doesn’t happen; instead he goes round and back and round the bed, round the two singles pushed together, as if orbiting John. As if held there. Surely nothing holds Sherlock. Except, somehow, John does. It’s even a little peaceful, with Sherlock gaunt and frantic and aimlessly striking the furniture as he paces. There’s no pretence, and that’s the thing that drains you. They don’t speak, but their eyes meet.

John will accept the here and now. It’s true that he doesn’t cry for men he kills, but he takes their deaths inside, and slowly they burn him. That feels like a bare minimum of justice, sometimes. That is until Sherlock says _be here_ , and John’s priorities come online again. Most likely they’ll die in Russia, but there are worse things. John didn’t fight his way back to the light in a surgeon’s tent in Afghanistan just to spend his time fearing death.

‘Sherlock,’ John says, but seems to go unheard. He just wanted to say it, because he can, because Sherlock is for now out of calling but never truly out of reach. When, a few days before he was shot, an Afghan falcon alighted on John’s wrist for a few miraculous seconds, the sense of blessing and loss seemed all the deeper for being so sudden. John is always anticipating, has already experienced, the similar loss of Sherlock. But here they are, again.

Sherlock’s pace is slowing. He stares ahead.

No doubt John will never see quite what Sherlock sees. That’s OK. _Conductor of light_ , Sherlock said. John says, ‘Sherlock?’

Sherlock stops and stands. When he meets John’s eyes for the thousandth time, the barrier in them has dwindled to a haze of ordinary despair. 

‘Are you back?’ John asks.

Sherlock subsides onto the bed.

 

**Sherlock**

Aftershocks of wretchedness and power echo through him, but the ceiling is white and wonderfully free of meaning as Sherlock lies beside John and gathers himself in. It appears all his pieces are still, somehow, present.

Not logic, not fucking, not rage have been able to make this illness bearable, but John’s arm is gentle and solid across his chest.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sherlock says. A lifetime of never apologising for who he is – and finally it’s easy. He’s flawed like the rest, but unlike most of them he’ll deal with it. Beside him, John goes up on an elbow. Between Sherlock and the ceiling, his smiling, weathered face.

_This is love, then. Mother, did you know?_

John leans in to kiss him. A hand slides down Sherlock’s back, then cups the cheek of his arse, and fingers dig in, just a little beyond the point of comfort, before they relax. Anchorage, a reminder of something they will have again.

An odd feeling is growing in Sherlock’s chest. He fights it. He will always fight it, this intimate violation, moodswings like bodily nausea, haze like fever in his head...

Then he realises. And it’s bleakly hilarious. Distraction, relief. A blessing, in a sense. Life again.

‘John, I suggest you move. I’m about to be physically sick,’ Sherlock says.


	3. Chapter 3

**Epilogue**

**John**

It’s a bloody virus, of course it is. John spends a week holding up the metal hotel room bin for Sherlock to throw up in. Then _he_ gets the damn infection and realises that Sherlock, still wobbly, is going to have to look after him. Thank fuck he won’t be as ill as Sherlock was, being less run down to start with. 

Half-delirious the first afternoon, trying to fend off the conviction that the bedclothes are rats biting his toes, John hears Sherlock on the phone to Kolyanov - simply _on the phone_ to him, matter-of-fact as only Sherlock can be - trading some information garnered from his travels in return for delaying the threatened murder of their friends. Then Sherlock goes into the ensuite bathroom without closing the door. His expression impassive in the wall mirror, he swallows lithium, the second time he’s done so since becoming able to keep it down, and then returns to sit on his side of the pushed-together single beds.

He stares at John, seeming neutral and muted, the way he’s been more and more of the time since the virus let up. It’s a front, John is sure, for something much worse going on inside. John aches to help and can do nothing. Until he manages what must be a pretty watery smirk, and Sherlock’s eyes briefly kindle with the spark that first drew John to him, so long ago at Barts.

‘Hello,’ John murmurs. Then, ‘Sorry.’ Fever both warps and clarifies his thinking – a taste of what Sherlock endures, perhaps. Oddly surging gunfire rhythms draw him deeper, to where his worn self is waiting for review. Wounded soldier, stinking of desert, blood on his hands, but now one of a pair, a lover. Outside in the world, Sherlock has placed a hand on John’s hand and is peering anxiously into his face. Love... how do these things happen? They do though. It’s life, and it’s better than the other thing.

John needs to stay.

‘We’ll get through this,’ John promises. ‘We –’ 

Fever takes him, bright ringing pain, the sensation of Sherlock’s fingers dwindling into warm blackness. John goes, not willingly, but freely enough, because both of them know that he will come back, again.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Croatia Between [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10460328) by [songlin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/songlin/pseuds/songlin)




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